


Deliver Me to Destiny

by what_alchemy



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-10
Updated: 2015-03-10
Packaged: 2018-03-17 06:19:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3518633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/what_alchemy/pseuds/what_alchemy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam keeps walking in on Bucky Barnes doing embarrassing shit, and man, he didn't sign up for this.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deliver Me to Destiny

Sam 100% moved into the tower with a shitload of cracked-out superheroes because he got a great offer at a VA in the city, not because he wanted to keep an eye on a couple of old-ass self-destructive super soldiers and one stone cold whipcord of a woman who could tase him any day she liked, _Tony_.

Sam was a professional. And Sam was just crunchy granola enough to think talking about feelings and discussing coping mechanisms was the way out of the abyss for almost any vet on the brink. New York was teeming with vets who couldn’t get housing and employment because of debilitating cases of PTSD and all the satellite diagnoses around it. Sam could be of use in New York, and if he got the bonus of flying around making sure his best guy wasn’t getting into scrapes he couldn’t get out of, well, what was the harm?

That didn’t mean he’d signed up for _this_.

Barnes held his tablet out to Sam in his right hand while he used his metal hand to point at the screen.

The screen which was currently playing some freaky bisexual pegging porn in one window and an “It Gets Better” video in another. Earnest entreatments to keep going in the face of bigotry and discrimination were just not meant to have a soundtrack of squelches and moans, and, well, earnest entreatments to keep going. 

“Um,” Sam said.

“The internet says I can make time with whoever I want and no one can give me electroshock,” Barnes said.

Sam’s heart swooped and he pressed his lips together. He crossed his arms because if he wasn’t careful, one of his hands might make its way to Barnes’s shoulder to give it a squeeze, and he wasn’t sure they were there yet. Being the coming-out point man had never been his professional speciality, but this was personal and he could handle it. Especially if it meant the mutual pining on floor 498 would come to an end. 

“That’s right,” Sam said. “The way we think of sexuality is different than it used to be. More open and more accepting, though it’s certainly not a paradise. If you ever want more resources—”

“I have to show Clint,” Barnes said, tapping his tablet off and trundling it up under one arm. “And Pepper Potts.” Barnes, for no reason Sam could figure out, had developed a puppy-like affinity for Ms. Potts, and she’d taken it with the kind of compassion and aplomb that made Sam want to kiss her, but man, she didn’t deserve this. 

“Uh, hey, maybe not?”

“Why?” Barnes tilted his head at him, blue eyes wide and clear. He reminded Sam of innocence, but the kind of innocence people talked about when they talked about ravening wolves. 

Now, Sam wasn’t into sex negativity or shaming folks for pretty much anything, that was just some bullshit, but there was such a thing as discretion and appropriate venues and social contracts, and Barnes hadn’t really gotten the memo on any of it just yet, even six months after Sam and Steve had coaxed him in from the cold.

“I mean, I’m pretty sure Clint would be into the whole package,” he said, waving his hand around at the tablet. “But Pepper might be less into the, uh, _blue movie_ and more into the one where the girl talks about her life and then shows us her weird ugly dog.”

“He’s a pug/chihuahua, and he’s _old_.” Barnes hid the tablet and scowled at him. Sam tried not to let out the laugh caught in his gullet. 

“Sorry, dude,” Sam said. “It’s a super cute weird ugly dog, and maybe you could send the link to Ms. Potts in an email.”

“I can copy/paste,” Barnes said. 

“Awesome.”

“But there are lots of different blue movies, which one do you think she’d like?”

—

It was an ordinary Wednesday night when Maria Hill finally looked Sam up and down and said, “How would you feel about me using you for your body?”

Of course, Sam said, “Ma’am, yes, ma’am,” and Maria pinned him to the bed, hit him repeatedly in the face with her tiny perfect boobs, the angels sang, and that was that.

—

Colonel Rhodes and Tony Stark were in the communal kitchen arguing about Beyoncé. Sam almost died when he met Colonel Rhodes last year, and he was pretty sure he was still having heart palpitations about it, and he was loath to agree with Tony Stark on anything, but he could not stand idly by while the good Colonel — while anyone! — insulted the queen.

“Hold up, hold up, hold up,” Sam said, and Tony Stark and the Colonel paused in their bickering to blink a matching pair of pretty brown eyes at him. “Colonel Rhodes, are you saying you _don’t like Beyoncé?_ ”

“I’m just saying she’s no Whitney, is that so wrong?” Colonel Rhodes said. 

“Nobody’s Whitney!” Sam cried. “Nobody’s asking her to be Whitney! We get to have both! Life is beautiful!”

“This is what I’m talking about!” Tony Stark crowed, slapping Sam on the back. “Wilson knows what’s up, I always knew it. Now let me make you some new wings, I don’t trust that Wakandan stuff for a minute.” Tony winked, or maybe it was a twitch, but Sam rolled his eyes.

“Man, don’t even,” he said, shrugging out from under Tony’s hand. “Buy Black.”

“Buy American!”

“Shut up, Tony,” Colonel Rhodes said, but Tony waved his hands around and suddenly _Single Ladies_ drowned out their voices and made the windows shake. A holographic Beyoncé danced around all of them waving her hand and snapping her hips.

There was movement in Sam’s peripheral vision, and when he turned his head, he found Barnes stock-still in the doorway, hair wild and eyes big.

 _What?_ he signed in clumsy ASL. Everyone was learning for Clint, who had gone away to cry when he found out. Not that anyone was ever going to talk about it or acknowledge it happened at all, amen.

 _The Queen reigns_ , Sam signed back. Barnes just tilted his head and looked off to the side, where Sam finally noticed the Colonel had Tony Stark in a headlock. He contemplated separating them with some kind of stick before turning back to Barnes, but in the doorway now there was only empty space.

—

Sam walked in on Clint and Ms. Potts discussing the merits of the pornography Barnes had shared with them. Apparently Clint had gotten the pegging flick Sam had glimpsed, wherein a thick, muscle-bound dude enjoyed being spit-roasted on two cocks, while Ms. Potts had received a, quote, “very sweet” home video type deal of two older dudes getting it on gently while declaring their love for each other. Clint and Ms. Potts turned from their tablets to face Sam with a pair of matching sunny smiles, and Sam just backed out of the room.

—

A soft knocking woke Sam from his half-sleeping stupor underneath a bunch of gangly naked limbs and a mouthful of straight brown hair. He grunted; Maria growled and tightened her legs around him.

“Can’t breathe!” he gasped, and she grumbled and slid off him, their sticky skins peeling off each other in a way that should have been unpleasant but instead was kind of funny the way Sam liked sex and love and all that good stuff to be. 

The knock came again, timid and ridiculous. Sam glanced at the clock — 12:51 am. He sighed and hauled his ass up to pull on some boxers and pad over to the door. He made sure Maria was covered before he cracked it open and found Steve on the other side, shoulders hunched in as if he could make himself smaller by sheer force of will, eyes round and sheepish.

“Hey,” he whispered.

“What’s up?” Sam said. 

“Sorry,” Steve said. “Just, you know how Bucky feels about e-books?”

Sam rubbed at his head, where phantom pains of the time Barnes had sent a Kindle crashing into his skull still bothered him on occasion. After the Kindle Incident, as everyone called it, Barnes had gutted the thing and made some kind of sculpture with it and displayed it on the mantle in his and Steve’s apartment, presumably as a warning to all other e-books that might cross his path. 

“Yeah,” Sam said.

“Well, he just found out there were sequels to _The Hobbit_ , which he’d read until it was in tatters back in the day, and none of the independent bookstores are open right now, and I know you have that box set, so I thought maybe if you were already awake…?”

“Yeah.” Sam cleared his throat. “Yeah sure, just a sec.”

He shut the door to Steve’s big dumb grateful face and tiptoed back to bed, where Maria was lying twisted up in an improbable position right by the bookshelves. He’d just located _The Lord of the Rings_ , which his granddad had given him when he was twelve, when he caught the glint of one blue eye through slitted eyelids. 

“My butt is cold,” she whispered.

“I’ll be right back,” he said. 

In a few strides he was back at the door, pressing the set into Steve’s hands and eliciting ten thousand promises that his boy wouldn’t fuck it up with ripping or highlighting or throwing or dogearing or whatever it was Barneses did when reading high fantasy World War II allegories.

“Thanks, Sam,” Steve said. “We’ll get it back to you ASAP.”

“In perfect condition!” Sam said. Steve cracked a grin and left, those preposterous shoulders of his once again straight and square. Sam shook his head and turned back around. Maria had kicked the covers off, and moonlight slanted pale over the lines of her body. She smiled at him, slow and deadly, and drew him back to bed.

—

The next week, movie night was more like movie endurance test, because even though it was Steve’s night to pick, somehow they were watching the entire _Lord of the Rings_ movie trilogy, extended edition. Maria bowed out, Natasha and Fury were spared the torture on account of being somewhere in Europe, Sam fell asleep a lot, Thor fell asleep all the way through, Clint and Bruce inched closer and closer to the screen as time wore on, and Tony Stark and Colonel Rhodes whispered to each other the whole time while Ms. Potts periodically shushed them with just the arch of her fine, judgmental eyebrows.

Barnes, though. Barnes was rapt. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t even blink, as far as Sam could tell. 

And Steve just watched him.

—

Sam went down to Steve and Barnes’s floor to check on getting his books back, but when he got there, Steve was absent and Barnes was stalking around, flapping his hand and muttering to himself. He was lifting his feet up high and stomping them down again before punching the air and flipping his hair all around. It was a little weird, but he didn’t look angry about anything, and Sam figured he should just slide on out easy as he came in so the both of them could avoid some embarrassment. The books would keep, and Steve hadn’t been slinking around with a guilty look on his face, so Sam figured they hadn’t been shredded beyond repair or anything.

—

Sam woke up with a ring on his head. A ring with the black speech of Mordor engraved on it. He blinked his sleep away and pushed himself up onto his elbows. The ring thunked onto his bed and he stared at it for a second. On his bedside was his box set, and on top of it was another ring to rule them all.

“What the shit,” he said. “It’s too early.”

When he was showered and dressed for his morning run, he went down to the kitchen and found another ring of power on the toaster. There was one inside a Captain America mug, one on a cake pan, one on a box of Lucky Charms, one on Mjolnir, one _in_ the orange juice, and one just lying on the floor. Sam shook his head, slapped himself a little after his close call with the one ring to rule all the orange juice, and went out for his run.

—

There were rings all over Sam’s office in the VA. And when he came home after work with a tote bag full of rings of power, he found Steve in the kitchen putting away groceries. Light glinted off some metal on a very important finger.

“Steve,” he said. “You know that’s Isildur’s Bane? Quick, we need the fires of Mount Doom, stat!”

Steve just gave him that shy smile he had, the one where his lips went perfectly curved and his eyelashes swept downward even as he looked up through them at Sam. He held up his hand as if considering. The one ring — good solid platinum, not like the cheap nickel-plated ones Sam had just found all over himself, the tower, and his belongings — shone proudly on Steve’s left ring finger.

“I guess he liked it,” Steve said. “So he put a—”

“Yeah, I got that,” Sam said. Steve grinned at him, and Sam threw himself forward into a bear hug. Steve hugged back, just shy of too tight.

—

Later, after the ceremony, after standing up beside Steve at the altar and blubbing like someone’s mom, after the reception and the toasts and the honeymoon and alien threat #5641, he asked Steve if he minded that his wedding ring was the goddamn universally acknowledged symbol of ultimate greed and evil.

“You know,” Steve said, “I don’t think of it like that. Of course that’s its function in the books, but here, with Bucky, through everything — it’s something else. It’s about….walking through the fire, and coming out alive. A little crisp around the edges, but alive, and okay, and together. It’s about making it to the other side, and finding out that love really can be unconditional.” He shrugged. “I like it.”

He twiddled it so it twisted on his finger. The script said something different than what Sam knew the real one ring said, but he didn’t ask. Barnes came up silent beside him, and Steve looked up at him as if he were the frigging sun in the sky. 

“You makin’ time with my husband, Wilson?” Barnes said, his voice gruff. 

“Better watch out, Barnes,” Sam said. “You know you got nothing on this ass.” He shook his hips a little, and Steve snorted. 

Barnes almost smiled at him. He definitely, certainly, absolutely swatted him on said ass, and as Steve laughed hard enough to shake the building at Sam’s yelp, Sam felt Barnes slip something small, cool, and circular into his palm.

**End**

**Author's Note:**

> Happy 98th birthday, Bucky Barnes!


End file.
